Topkapı Palace in Istanbul has opened a new Tile Art Gallery in its Mabeyn section, featuring a restored historic passage that connects the Mabeyn area with the Harem-i Hümayun. The gallery, called the Mabeyn Yolu (Route) Tile Art Gallery, showcases the stylistic and technical evolution of Ottoman tile art from Iznik to Kütahya, displaying tiles that were previously kept in storage. National Palaces President Professor Yasin Yıldız announced that the project took nearly three years and includes tiles bearing the names of Ottoman sultans from Osman Gazi to Sultan Selim II, as well as couplets from the 11th-century poem "Qasida al-Munfarija."
The opening matters because it restores a forgotten corridor of the palace and makes a significant portion of Topkapı's rich tile collection accessible to the public for the first time. The gallery offers a thematic narrative of Ottoman tile art from the 16th to 18th centuries, highlighting cultural interactions and aesthetic evolution. This project also reflects ongoing conservation efforts by the National Palaces Administration, which moved over 2,000 crates of tiles, established a restoration workshop, and documented thousands of patterns, thereby preserving an important aspect of Turkey's cultural heritage.